The Welland-Fosse Benefice: Prayers and Notices

 Sunday 21 March 2021:  Lent V. Passion Sunday

 

• Please remember in your prayers those who are sick: Ray Bailey, Sylvia Martin and Jane Williams.
• Pray too for our PCC’s preparing for their Annual Meetings and especially for potential wardens to emerge in Barrowden where the current wardens are due to retire after many years faithful service. A limit of 6 years maximum has now been placed on warden’s service in Barrowden.
• Today, the Zoom Service will be at 11am.
• Zoom Morning Prayer continues on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8.30 am. Compline is on a Thursday at 6pm. If you would like an invitation to Compline,, contact Sally Smith, sally@saltlane.com
• ‘Just the Job’: the next session starts at 7pm on Monday 29 March with ‘The Medics’.
• Compline on Sundays in Lent starts at 6pm. This week, our own Simon Aley, a lawyer, will talk about the virtue of Justice. Martin Beattie is our host. Please contact him if you wish to join the Zoom service, beattie@btinternet.com.
• Coming up: Maundy Thursday Walking Meditation, 1^st April 6pm on YouTube; Good Friday Meditation, 2 pm on Zoom via Martin Beattie.

 

SOUTH LUFFENHAM:
Our Church will be open for private prayer every day from 10 – 4 pm.

Coffee Zoom Meeting Monday 22nd March at 3.30pm.

If you would like to come to the 9.30am service on Easter Sunday at South Luffenham please email sally@saltlane.com.

  For the other services in the Benefice on  Easter Day including the 11.00 am at Barrowden  see the April services published early so people can plan ahead.

 

This Week’s Meditation: A Murmuration of Starlings

 

It is a sight of exquisite and unexplainable beauty to see these birds gyrate across the sky at any time of day but perhaps especially at dusk. They are going home. The bulking black volume which attracts the eye suddenly mutates into a retreat which catches the rays of the dying sun and glints like steel until they turn again and become transparent. Never static, the tracery turns again. A hard edge is seen until it melts into the most delicate shape and is gone.

 

Today is Passion Sunday – two Sundays before Easter – and the shape of the cross comes into clearer focus as Lent dies away and the events of Good Friday loom large. We begin once more to feel its shadow fall across us; the glint of the hard edge of mortality reminds us of the death of the God who came to save us and the Man in whom we place our hopes.  Like the murmuration, the meaning, the shape and the work of the cross are not entirely clear. At one moment it is a sign of hope – our only hope – and in another moment a repulsive sign of torture. It is illusive. The hard edge cuts through the dust which we throw up to escape from God yet on other occasions it appear as a sight of breath-taking beauty with its thousand spangled lights reminding us on eternity.

 

The Cross: a mystery; a revelation; our only hope. Amen.

 

See wellandfosse.org for much more information, including contact details for

The Very Rev Christopher Armstrong and the churchwardens